A teacher looks back on a quarter-century in the classroom and says that, for the first time, she is being told what to teach, how to teach it and when, preventing her from helping her students in the way she knows they need. "Hold me accountable, but let me do it my way," she says.

A literacy expert writes that the Obama administration's proposal for the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, A Blueprint for Reform, is on the right track in its literacy goals in its Blueprint for Reform. However, the goals as currently stated are very general and could lead to literacy approaches that might not be effective.

Since the American Dialect Society named "google" as the word that best describes the past decade, I keep asking people if they agree or would have picked one of the contenders: “9/11,” "green," "blog," "text" and "war on terror."
Some liked “google” best defined the period, others “9/11” and one said “global warming,” the “word of the decade” picked by the Global Language Monitor, which analyzes and tracks language trends.
Opinion was not unanimous either, on some of the other words selected by the society, including the decade’s most creative word word--“Dracula sneeze”--and the most euphemistic--“the Appalachian trail (see explanations below).

Meet Donalyn Miller, a sixth-grade language arts teacher in Texas and author of "The Book Whisperer." Here she tells us exactly how to get kids who would never voluntarily pick up a book learn to love to read. And she explains what a 14-year-old boy told her about reading "Twilight," and why she told, "No nobler reason for reading a book has ever existed."=